Self-Driving Cars: 5 Problems That Need Solutions

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Google recently released data showing that its self-driving cars
have been involved in 11 minor crashes over the past six years,
which has raised questions about when such autonomous vehicles
will be ready for prime time.

The report suggests that most of the crashes were likely due to
human driver error, and may not have been preventable, said
Steven Shladover, a researcher at the Partners for Advanced
Transportation Technology at the University of California,
Berkeley.

Still, while some levels of automation are already in existing
cars, completely driverless cars — with no steering wheels or
brakes for human drivers — would require much more innovation,
Shladover said. [ 10
Technologies That Will Change Your Life ]

"If you want to get to the level where you could put the
elementary school kid into the car and it would take the kid to
school with no parent there, or the one that's going to take a
blind person to their medical appointment, that's many decades
away," Shladover told Live Science.

From ultra-precise maps to fail-proof software, here are five
problems that must be solved before self-driving cars hit the
roadways.

Better software

Driving in the United States is actually incredibly safe, with
fatal crashes occurring once every roughly 3 million hours of
driving.
Driverless vehicles will need to be even safer than that,
Shladover said.

Given existing software, "that is amazingly difficult to do," he
said.

That's because no software in laptops, phones or other modern
devices is designed to operate for extended periods without
freezing, crashing or dropping a call — and similar errors would
be deadly in a car. Right now,
Google's self-driving cars avoid this by having both a backup
driver and a second person as a monitor, who can shut off the
system at the first hint of a glitch. But coming up with
safety-critical, fail-safe software for completely driverless
cars would require reimagining how software is designed,
Shladover said.

"There is no current process to efficiently develop safe
software," Shladover said. For instance, when Boeing develops new
airplanes, half of their costs go to checking and validating that
the software works correctly, and that's in planes that are
mostly operated by humans. [ Photos:
The Robotic Evolution of Self-Driving Cars ]

Better maps

Nowadays, Google's self-driving cars seem to operate seamlessly
on the streets of Mountain View, California. But that's because
the company has essentially created a kind of
Street View on steroids, a virtual-world map of the town.
That way, the self-driving cars know exactly how the streets look
when empty, and only have to fill in the obstacles, such as cars
and pedestrians,
reported The Atlantic.

Driverless vehicles, with their current sensors and processing,
may not be able to operate as smoothly without such a detailed
map of the rest of the world, according to the article, but so
far Google has mapped only about 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometers)
of the 4 million miles (6.4 million km) of roadway in the United
States.

Better sensors

Before people all toss their drivers' licenses, a self-driving
car must be able to distinguish between dangerous and harmless
situations.

"Otherwise, it's going to be slamming on the brakes all the time
for no reason," Shladover said.

For instance, potholes or a nail below a tire are incredibly hard
to spot until just before they've been hit, while a paper bag
floating across the highway may be very conspicuous, but not very
dangerous, he said.

The cars also need to decide in sufficient time whether a
pedestrian waiting on the sidewalk is likely to walk into
traffic, or whether a bike is going to swerve left. Human brains
do a masterful job of sorting and reacting to these hazards on
the fly, but the current crop of sensors just isn't equipped to
process that data as quickly, Shladover said.

Once driverless cars begin to proliferate, they will need a much
better way to communicate with other vehicles on the road. As
different situations emerge, these cars will need to flexibly
adjust to other cars on the roadways, reroute on the fly and talk
to other driverless cars. But right now, communication among
individual self-driving cars is minimal.

"If they don't have the communication capability, they will
probably make traffic worse than it is today," Shladover said.

Ethical robots

And then there are the ethical issues. Sometimes, a driver must
decide whether to swerve right or left, for instance — either
injuring three people in a truck or potentially killing a person
on a motorcycle. Those types of ethical dilemmas would require
the software in a self-driving car to weigh all the different
outcomes and come to a final solution on its own.

A machine that can do that would be unprecedented in human
history, Shladover said. Even
drones that target enemies in war are remotely manned by a
human who has final say about the killing, Shladover added.

"There's always a human on the other side who has to make that
decision about using deadly force," Shladover said.